Variable independiente

This brings us, fi nally, to Deleuze. Ann Weinstone has grouped Deleuze’s work with the ‘major philosophical and techno-scientifi c sources for pro-gressive posthumanism’ (Weinstone 2004: 10). I am wary of embracing the term ‘posthuman’ in relation to Deleuze’s work. Its use to indicate mutually exclusive theoretical stances means that it risks meaning every-thing and noevery-thing, while muddying the conceptual fi eld. However, given its popular currency in cultural theory, this is probably a losing battle. If we want to situate Deleuze in regard to this discourse and ask whether he is a posthumanist, then I contend that the answer depends very much on which form of posthumanism we have in mind. It seems evident to me that of the two views outlined here (admittedly, with a speed and superfi ciality that risks caricature), Deleuze’s thought would align quite well with the ‘materialist’, and would be vigorously opposed to the

‘dualist’. That is to say, if by ‘posthumanist’ we mean that he questions Enlightenment rationality and the unity of the subject, while insisting on a form of critique that encompasses both material conditions and cultural codings, then it would be fair to call Deleuze a posthumanist. If we mean, instead, that Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-machine and machinic assemblages can be equated to Moravec’s exhortations liter-ally to ‘upload’ human consciousness into superior machines, then the term is not only inaccurate, but it also risks a gross misunderstanding of Deleuze’s, and Deleuze and Guattari’s, overall project.

However, as the last sentence indicates, the fi rst question we face in deciding where to situate Deleuze and Guattari’s work in the post-humanist debates is what to make of certain superfi cial resonances between some of Deleuze and Guattari’s more ecstatic statements and a Moravecian image of merging with machines. How do we respond

to those who see congruities between Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic production, Body without Organs (BwO) and assemblages on one hand, and Moravec’s merging of intelligence into machines on the other? Is Moravec’s vision of mind merging with machine not just an example of the kind of impure minglings, assemblages, and cross-pollinations that Deleuze and Guattari urge us towards? Is it, in fact, not the inevitable result of Deleuze and Guattari’s own de-privileging of the human and their blurring of the boundary between the organic and non-organic? In short, is Moravec’s ‘becoming machine’ not a prime example of what it would mean to embrace a Deleuze and Guattarian ontology of becom-ing? A cursory reading of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, or a chance encounter with select excerpts, might indeed leave one with the impression that Deleuze and Guattari are promoting a kind of ‘becom-ing’ that would ultimately transcend the ‘merely’ human body. The language is undeniably there: the talk of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’, the image of becoming almost anything other than human, the machinic assemblages. Taken out of context, phrases like ‘the real difference is not between the living and the machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 285) might seem to support a Moravecian view.

The obvious fi rst response is that what Deleuze and Guattari mean by machines, whether they speak of ‘desiring-machines’, ‘social machines’,

‘organic machines’, ‘war machines’, or ‘machinic assemblages’, is simply not what Moravec or Kurzweil means by machines. Deleuze and Guattari are not talking about computers, or steam engines for that matter, when they discuss whether there is a difference between the living and the machine (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 285). ‘Machines’

offer Deleuze and Guattari a way to talk about the differential interac-tions of forces and processes of individuation that underlie, connect, and structure all entities, whether mineral, animal, or machine. This leads us to the longer response, which is that such a cursory, impressionistic reading misses the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s many ‘machines’ are part of a larger ontological critique – one, moreover, that is fi rmly situ-ated in a materialist refusal of transcendence that is incompatible with a Moravecian worldview.

Deleuze laid out the basis of this ontological critique in 1968 in the fi rst fully developed statement of his own thought, Difference and Repetition.⁸ Hayles has identifi ed the shift from humanism to the posthuman with a ‘signifi cant shift in underlying assumptions about subjectivity’ towards a conception of the subject as ‘an amalgam, a col-lection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’

(Hayles 1999: 3). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze lays the ground-work for just such an ambitious and fundamental shift in the conception of subjectivity. Situating his critique squarely against Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, and Kant, Deleuze argues against a representational metaphys-ics and epistemology that relies on the reifi cation of categories and produces a dualistic and transcendent ‘image of thought’. The shift that Deleuze proposes is nothing less than a complete re-evaluation of the Western philosophical canon. At the heart of this re-evaluation is a critique of ‘the subject’ and the logic of identity that makes this subject possible. Drawing on Duns Scotus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, Deleuze calls into question the negations and either/or structures that efface real differences and argues for a mode of thought that does not subjugate difference to identity (Deleuze 1994: esp. 281–2). Instead, he offers a theory of forces that are differentiated by varying degrees of intensity.

These differences in intensity produce more differentiations in an expo-nential process that fi nally produces entities that we recognize as discrete objects, individuals, and eventually, subjects. Deleuze’s point here is that difference is prior to and produces individuals. This has two conse-quences: the individual is the result of a series of differentiations, not an essence; and as a contingent result of an ongoing process, the ‘individ-ual’ (here we can fi ll in ‘object’, ‘self’, or any entity) is merely shorthand for a relatively stable state of affairs that is both partially determined by previous states and open to change. Another important point that will be relevant in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and in relation to posthu-manism, is that on this ontological account there are no fi rm or absolute boundaries between one ‘thing’ and the next. Boundaries exist, as zones of consistency, but they remain permeable and open to transformation, or becoming other.

It is in Difference and Repetition that Deleuze introduces and argues for ‘becoming’ as a more accurate description of our ontological situ-ation than Platonic ‘being’. In his work with Guattari, ‘becoming’ is often taken as just a trendy catch phrase. Turning to Difference and Repetition, we see that ‘becoming’ is crucial to the fundamental shift in subjectivity for which Deleuze argues. Becoming refers both to the endless process of differentiation and to our relation to our own sub-jectivity. Deleuze’s concept of becoming is indebted to Nietzsche, who advocates ‘[b]ecoming as inventing, willing, self-negating, self-overcom-ing: no subject but a doing, positing, creative’ (Nietzsche 2003: 138).

In displacing identity and being with difference and becoming, Deleuze argues for a new understanding of subjectivity as a process, a ‘doing’

that is at once creative and critical. In contrast to the unifi ed Platonic

or Kantian subject, Deleuze paints a picture of identity as decentered, distributed, and emerging from a series of highly complex interactions between pre-personal forces. The result is a subjectivity that is remark-ably similar to what Hayles describes as ‘posthuman’. Crucially, identity is revealed not as an essence, but as ‘an amalgam of heterogeneous ele-ments’ that include biological and evolutionary processes, social and cultural codings, and accidents of history. The forms that life takes and the particular individuals and identities that arise are both determined to some extent and open to change or becoming other than what they are at any given moment. The self must be made, but it is always constituted in a context. This vision of subjectivity as emerging out of a process of becoming is resolutely materialist. If we have any doubt of this, we need only recall the source of the opposition between being and becoming.

In the Republic, Plato rejects Heraclitean fl ux on the grounds that this material chaos, this becoming, obscures the unchanging, non-material truth of the Forms (Plato 1991).⁹ In Platonic terms, becoming is ‘not real’ and ‘not true’. Its materiality, its participation in the physical world of things and stuff and dirt and bodies, makes it incompatible with truth. At best, it is an imperfect representation of a ‘pure’ idea. When Deleuze returns to becoming, he returns to the founding moment of Western metaphysics and purposefully unleashes all the mess and chaos of material fl ux that Plato wanted to control by consigning it to ‘mere representation’.

This vision of subjectivity remains remarkably consistent through Deleuze’s work with Guattari until his late essay ‘Immanence: A Life . . .’. In many ways, it anticipates much of the critical project of what I have provisionally identifi ed as ‘materialist’ posthumanism. A better term might be ‘immanent’ posthumanism. Deleuze’s philosophical com-mitments align him with those like Haraway and Hayles, for whom the critique of subjectivity spans both the obviously ‘material’ (biological processes) and the ‘cultural’ or ‘social’ codings that make identity intel-ligible. Though they are not ‘material’ in a physical sense, neither are they merely abstract nor transcendent, ahistorical truths. These social and cultural codings are always immanent to a particular situation or environment. Subtly, for each of these thinkers, these cultural and social codings have ‘real’ – that is, material – effects. For Deleuze, as for Haraway and Hayles, an immanent worldview that takes into account a range of heterogeneous forces is crucial to critiquing a form of subjectiv-ity that, for various reasons, they fi nd to be inaccurate, distorting, and even oppressive.

With this in mind, I would like to return to the question of the body in

Deleuze and Guattari’s work. The main target of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus is the same logic of identity that Deleuze fi rst targeted in Difference and Repetition.

This logic depends on a strict separation between self and other, inside and outside, natural and unnatural, human and machine, and human and animal, to name just a few. Deleuze and Guattari systematically set about undermining this series of oppositions. In doing so, they repeatedly call into question the ‘fact’ of a unifi ed, contained subject.

Traditionally, the boundary of the subject is identifi ed with the boundary of the fl esh; I end where my skin ends. This idea depends on a naturalized idea of the body as ‘given’ and obvious. Deleuze and Guattari, however, illustrate how the body must be constituted through

‘codings’, which are the result of the regulation, control, and interac-tions of various ‘fl ows’, including the biological, technological, and cultural. In A Thousand Plateaus, they use the example of the face or

‘faciality’ to discuss how a surface, itself the result of the convergence of a thousand tiny fl ows, is signifi ed as something, as someone (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 167–73). They ask us to be critical of the socially constructed, socially coded, but naturalized face and the underlying logic of identity that supports it. In doing so, they suggest that ‘the body’

is always more than its biological parts or fl eshy boundaries. By opening the body beyond the limits of the fl esh, to include its social and cultural codings, Deleuze and Guattari displace the body from what we tradi-tionally think of as the ‘material’ realm, that of biology, while precisely insisting on its materiality. Braidotti clarifi es this seeming contradiction when she writes that:

The embodiedness of the subject is for Deleuze a form of bodily materiality, not of the natural, biological kind. He rather takes the body as the complex interplay of highly constructed social and symbolic forces. The body is not an essence, let alone a biological substance; it is a play of forces, a surface of intensities; pure simulacra without originals. (Braidotti 1994: 112) The ‘material’ is not merely the biological. There is a whole range of forces that interact to form ‘the body’. For Deleuze, these forces have always been ‘material’. Unlike Moravec, Deleuze and Guattari’s machines are not mobilized to do away with or escape materiality in a general ‘becoming-machine’. Instead, as we have seen, ‘becoming’ has been, from the beginning, an indice for the recognition of materiality and material fl ux.

At the same time, drawing on Deleuze’s earlier ontological analysis, Deleuze and Guattari insistently undermine the boundary between the

organic and non-organic, the human and the machine, the human and the animal. The blurring or elimination of these boundaries has a strong relation to both forms of posthumanism that I have outlined above. It might also seem to support a Moravecian merging with machines. If there is no real difference between human and machine, then what is lost in merging them? The phrase ‘no real difference’ should be the fi rst indicator that something is wrong here. For Deleuze and Guattari, the undermining of boundaries can never mean that there is no difference.

Their point is more complicated: it is precisely because there are too many differences that these simple binary oppositions are insuffi cient.

In undermining the boundary between man and machine, Deleuze and Guattari do not aim to efface their differences, but to reveal their inter-relation and the fact that ‘calling into question the specifi c or personal unity of the organism’ and ‘calling in question the structural unity of the machine’ are part of the same ontological critique (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 284). Furthermore, in contrast to both a Moravecian posthumanism and some of their own most ardent supporters, Deleuze and Guattari recognize that there are material consequences of and limi-tations on our experimenlimi-tations. Deleuze may repeatedly insist on the Spinozistic question, ‘What can the body do?’, but this does not mean that he believes that the body can do just anything. His theory of forces and intensities is fi rmly situated in what Hayles describes as ‘the world of energy and matter and the constraints they imply’ (Hayles 1999:

236). There is a signifi cant difference between asking what the body can do and suggesting the body can do anything, or, recalling Moravec, doing away with the body altogether.

With this in mind, let us return to the question of where Deleuze’s work fi ts in the cyber theory and posthumanist debates. Deleuze’s project, from beginning to end, attempts to create a ‘signifi cant shift in underlying assumptions about subjectivity’. Hayles, following Haraway, identifi es a critique of the liberal humanist subject as a crucial feature of posthumanism, and explicitly recognizes Deleuze and Guattari as being engaged in a similar project (Hayles 1999: 4). Arguably, Deleuze takes this project even further, by returning to the philosophical roots and habits of thought that make a Lockean subject possible. In con-trast, Moravec’s ‘bubble of Mind’ preserves key features of the dualist subjectivity identifi ed with Plato and Enlightenment humanism, even as it promises to evolve past the human. As Chris Land observes with reference to Moravec’s ‘uploaded’ brain, ‘this fi gure of the post-human is surprisingly like the ideal of the liberal-humanist subject. Completely disembodied and obscenely rational, it is a pure will that has fi nally

cut itself free of its puppet strings to become a self-contained master’

(Land 2006: 122). Land has suggested the term ‘transhumanism’ as an alternative to distinguish a posthumanism that both critiques the liberal humanist model of subjectivity and affi rms materiality, from that of Moravec, Kurzweil, and other futurists (Land 2006: 113). Weinstone uses the term ‘progressive posthumanism’. Regardless of which term we prefer, what is clear is that Deleuze’s philosophical commitments align him with the strand of cyber theory and posthumanism that not only insists on a critique of subjectivity and a thorough coming to terms with embodiment and materiality, but that also sees these two tasks as intimately interconnected.

Of course, establishing that Deleuze’s work is more aligned with one form of posthumanism does not mean that there are not tensions. For example, Braidotti and others have already noted how Haraway’s cyborg might challenge Deleuze and Guattari’s famously troubled concept of

‘becoming woman’ (Braidotti 2006: 198; Braidotti 1994: 102–23). That said, it seems clear that there are signifi cant shared philosophical com-mitments. Though I remain wary of the term, I would even suggest that Deleuze’s ontology and the minor philosophical tradition that he identi-fi es as an alternative to the dominant Platonic tradition could constitute a philosophical lineage for a posthumanism that resolutely resists the temptations of transcendence.